Hey Everyone, a little late today with the preview thread but today has been a really busy day. We needed to resubmit our Hi Dracula! update today, I'll talk about that toward the end of the post but for anyone who isn't sure about what the new update is about. Hi Dracula! is a homage to iDracula, the game that was sitting at the top spot while we were at #2. We really love the game and thought it would be fun to do something relavant and quick with this update.

Hi Dracula will have lots of cool stuff, if you tap the moon, a vampire bat will come out and bite a sleeping pygmy turning him into a vampire. the Vampire Pygmy will then throw all the other pygmies off the island until you boot him off or turn the scene to daylight. If the sun is in sunset position, he just gets worried and begs you not to put the sun up, if it goes to full daylight, he burns and then eventually turns to ash and explodes. We also added the eclipse this update, which will safe the vampire by shielding him from sunlight.

On the technical front, didnt really have a lot of time to improve the texture sytem that much, I am almost done with another app that is really sound intensive, and I poured most of my time into that. I learned a lot about SoundUnit which is the lowest level access you can get to playing sound on the iPhone, we will eventually start using it for pocket god which means we will be able to start doing cooler things with our sounds.

This next week, I have to convert the textures to 16bit, and we will try to implement a keyframe animation system, so all the animations dont have to be big bitmaps, they can be a couple smaller bitmaps that are moved around relative to each other. an example would be for the pygmy, we would have a seperate head and body bitmap, and would just move the head by changing the relative offset to the body rather than have both pieces in the same bitmap. The idle for the pygmy is 6 frames of animation but all he does is move his head up and down, the tween method can reduce it to %20 of its size.

We want to use this new animation method for the tree, we want to figure out a way to animate it without taking a ton of space, and the only way would be to seperate the leaves from the trunk.

For the next update, here's a tease. We are going to do an old school pocket god update (what does that have to do with animating the tree?).

oh yea, about the resubmit. We found a bad crash bug in Sundays build, so I had to fix it today (thats why I was lurking). So Hi Dracula will probably be out a week from today. Maybe Monday night, Maybe Tuesday. We'll try and get back on track, but I think its safest for us to finish our updates and have them be ready to submit on Sunday night, but have Monday and Tuesday to test for crash bugs. I think Tuesday night will be our new submit date.

Oh my, Just when you think this cant get any better. God know its probably not going to come out until monday and the suspense is already killing me. You guys are doing a wonderful job and keeps gettin better Dave.

So it begs the question: When will you find yourself going to the every other week update because Im sure you cant keep up this pace much longer?

Dave, that sounds so cool!!! Hahahaha!
Love how you're paying tribute to the game that you were competing with. +10 respect pts to you for that! looking forward to this update!!!

Honestly, I am afraid to do every other week now. I don't want to risk it effecting our #1 spot. Allan and I will be getting together next week to create a road map that will get us to are more in depth game play features and I think we want to at least get that minimum functionality that we have been promising. I think after that, if we are just hovering in top of the ranking and not at #1 anymore. I think we might pull back a little.

Oh my, Just when you think this cant get any better. God know its probably not going to come out until monday and the suspense is already killing me. You guys are doing a wonderful job and keeps gettin better Dave.

So it begs the question: When will you find yourself going to the every other week update because Im sure you cant keep up this pace much longer?

To be honest, as long as he gets permission from the other indie developers, he could really have an infinite source of inspirational features! Can you imagine pygmies defending the island from a wave of Red Attackers? Or falling ice cream? A cameo appearance from a Spikey Rolando commando? Tiki monkeys building towers?
It could help cross-promotion between games, like how Little Big Planet (or whatever it's called) has cameos from Solid Snake, Sephiroth; Soul Calibur had Link and Darth Vader; etc. Of course Dave would need to be careful to animate them properly and faithfully, but the legal issue of Intellectual Property could pose a problem....

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